Inferno Park (51 page)

“I’ll eat your soul!” the recorded voice shouted. “
Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Outside the fence, the man in the striped hat shivered in clear disgust.

“Tricia!” Carter shouted. “Tricia, are you here?”

“Maybe we should just try to escape,” Victoria said.

The tall volcano rumbled, and heavy machinery groaned deep inside of it. The shrill, rusty squeals were so loud they seemed to claw into Carter’s eardrums. He winced and covered his ears.

The red pitchfork gate at the end of the ride screeched open, tearing through a thick overhang of vines. The rumbling grew closer.

Victoria clenched Carter’s hand more tightly.

The train lurched out of the darkness inside the mountain, trudging forward through the thick weeds that choked the tracks. Carter turned ice-cold inside as the last five years of nightmares became real. Here he was again, on the platform, watching the train approach, the devil laughing at him from high above. He wondered if it was real this time, or if it was just one more nightmare.

“Is that her?” Victoria whispered.

“Yes.”

Tricia sat in the front car, the lone passenger on the train as it pulled into the station. Fresh, bright red blood soaked her dress, as though she’d only just died.

The train braked to a rusty stop at the loading platform. Tricia was only a few feet away, in easy reach, but she didn’t stir. Her blood-soaked necklaces sat on her shoulders, surrounded the gory stump of her neck.

Carter was struck by how much she looked like a child now. He’d grown up over the last five years, but she never would.

“Tricia?” he whispered.

Tricia did not speak—it wasn’t like his dreams, when he heard her soft voice inside his head.

Instead, she held out one pale, lifeless hand, spattered with bright blood.

“She wants me to get on the ride,” Carter whispered. “That’s what she always wants in my dreams.”

“That can’t be a good idea,” Victoria said. “That ride is obviously falling apart. And she might...do what Becca did to Jared.”

“I was supposed to be with her,” Carter said. “I was supposed to die, but I was too afraid to join her. I’ve been living like a ghost ever since.”

He took a step toward Tricia.

“Wait,” Victoria said. “There’s no way this is the right thing to do. You could die, Carter.”

“By now you must know this is no simple amusement anymore. It’s real.” The man still stood outside the high pitchfork fence that encircled the mountain.

The crowd of ghosts had followed him, but they didn’t look so menacing at the moment. Their colorless eyes were upturned toward the enormous laughing devil head, their faces entranced as though it were a sacred bell calling the faithful to worship.

Carter considered what he knew about the ride. It was supposed to be a high-speed ride through Hell, filled with damned souls, demons, and other monstrosities. The idea of the ride had terrified him enough as a child. Now it had fallen into disrepair and rust, and if that didn’t make it dangerous enough, he would be riding it alongside the ghost of the girl he’d abandoned to die on her own.

And the man rumored to be the devil himself was telling him it wasn’t a ride, it was real.

“Let’s just leave,” Victoria whispered. “We can escape.”

“I have to do this.” Carter stepped to the edge of the platform, looking into the blood-splattered seat next to Tricia. He took her stiff, cold hand, her palm wet with gore.

“I’m coming with you, then.” Victoria took in a shaking breath and sighed, looking over the dilapidated black train.

“No. I need to do it alone.” Carter leaned toward her and whispered in a low voice. “It looks like he doesn’t want to come inside the fence. Maybe he can’t. Just wait here for me. The ride only takes a few minutes.”

He dropped into the car next to Tricia and buckled his seat belt. A shower of rust scraped free as the safety bar lowered across their laps.

Victoria looked down at him, shaking her head.

Another rusty squeal sounded, followed by the chattering, laughing voices of children. Ten of them, led by the giggling Kylie with pink ladybug barrettes in her blond braids, came screaming across the platform, flickering in and out of visibility. Victoria scrambled aside, looking horrified as the pale, muddy children with colorless eyes clambered into the train cars behind Carter.

“They’ve wanted to ride it for years,” the man in the striped hat said, glaring at him through the fence. “I don’t think it would be fair to deny them.”

“I just want to watch him die,” whispered Kylie, the ghost-girl in pink barrettes, as she slithered into the seat directly behind Carter. “I hope he gets his head cut off.”

Carter kept his head turned halfway around, watching the ten new arrivals from the side of his eye as they took their seats. They didn’t bother with seatbelts, and the safety bars didn’t drop for them, either. They would be free to crawl up and attack him at any moment during the ride.

Victoria cast him a worried look as the train lurched and began to trundle forward on the track, toward the steep hill into the devil’s waiting mouth.

As the train rolled past the fence, the man in the striped hat spoke a final time.

“I’ll give you one last chance, Carter,” he said. “If the ride grows too dangerous, simply press the red button in front of you. The train will stop, the lights will come up, and you’ll be free to walk away.”

Carter glanced at the dashboard area in front of him. He was almost certain that nothing had been there before, but there was now a large red button with the word STOP.

The train curved away from the fence and began to clack its way up the steep incline.

Tricia gripped his hand in hers. Her fingers were cold as ice and stiff as steel.

“Can you say anything, Tricia?” Carter whispered. He didn’t get a response, inside his mind or otherwise.

As the train climbed the hill, he could see the park spreading out below him, but there wasn’t much to see. It had reverted to old ruins, all the lights out except for the glowing red devil face above him.

The crumbling old tracks creaked under the weight of the train. A strong wind kicked up, and the tracks began to sway and crack, as though the entire support structure beneath the train would break apart at any moment.

The eight-story climb was painfully slow. His guts knotted up inside him. He clasped Tricia’s hand tighter, but her cold, dead skin was no comfort. His heart beat so fast he thought it would erupt from his chest.

I’m going to die
, Carter thought, while the tracks swayed beneath him.
I’m going to die in there.
Why did I do this?

The train reached the peak of the hill, then dipped forward as it entered the devil’s open, laughing jaws.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Victoria felt her knees shaking as she watched the black train carry Carter and the trainload of dead children up the steep, swaying hill into Inferno Mountain. Her knees tended to bob uncontrollably when she was nervous, and she hated it.

As Carter climbed up and away, the lights of the amusement park snuffed out like ten thousand candles. The game booths of Haunted Alley fell dark, as did the eerie blue lights of Dark Mansion. She risked stepping close to the pitchfork fence and looking out, but she saw no neon, not even from the high rides of Space City. The only light was the radiant red of the devil’s face against the sky.

She watched the train disappear into the flashing red lights of the devil’s mouth. High-pitched screams, angry growling, and rusty, thudding machinery sounded from inside the mountain. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was just an old recording.

A bright pair of lights appeared at the weed-choked base of Inferno Mountain, at the far side of the pitchfork fence. She watched as someone got out, unlocked a gate, and returned to the car.

A black Mercedes pulled in through the open gate, stopping at one side of the tracks. The driver left his headlights on as he climbed out of the car, swaying on his feet, and set a liquor bottle on his hood. He lit a cigar and looked up at the glowing devil face.

Victoria recognized him now—Theodore Hanover Junior, the owner of the park, the same man who had met with them and then failed to put them in touch with Artie Schopfer. She would recognize that curly toupee anywhere.

She had no idea why he would be here, and she was reluctant to make her presence known. She and Carter were both trespassing on his land, and she preferred to avoid the cops getting involved, so she decided to watch and wait.

Theodore heaved an old wooden crate from his back seat and dropped it to the ground next to his car. He leaned over and took something out of it. Victoria couldn’t see it very well, but it had a round cylindrical shape.

A gun
, she thought.
He brought a gun.
Then another thought, based on nothing but the manic, lost look on Hanover’s face:
He came here to kill himself
.

“You’re going down tonight!” he shouted up at the devil’s face. “You’re going right back to Hell.”

He raised his bottle as though toasting, then drank.

When he put his bottle aside, he took the cigar from his mouth and touched the glowing red tip to the cylindrical object in his hand. When he held it up, Victoria saw the burning fuse at the end and felt panic welling up within her. It was either fireworks or some kind of serious explosive, and somehow she didn’t think he’d driven out here in the night just to set off a few bottle rockets.

“Wait!” she screamed. “Hey, wait! My friend’s in there!”

Either Theodore didn’t hear her, which she doubted, or he was too caught up in his own madness to care. He held up the explosive—it looked very much like a stick of dynamite, she thought, though she’d never seen dynamite outside of cartoons.

“Stop!” Victoria screamed, but he was aiming it at the devil’s face, lining it up and pulsing it forward a few times in preparation for actually throwing it.

Victoria banged on the fence, but didn’t get his attention. She ran away from the tracks, zigzagged back through the waiting area, and hesitated at the gate.

The pitchfork fence seemed to provide some protection against the man in the striped hat and his minions. Maybe Carter was right, and his dead friend Tricia was somehow resisting the devil—if the man really was the devil—and so the devil had less power around Inferno Mountain.

If so, then stepping through the gate could be unwise, and even get her killed. The skeleton key was in Carter’s pocket. The gate might lock behind her, trapping her out of the only area in the park that seemed a little bit safe.

On the other hand, Carter’s life might be in serious danger if she did nothing to stop Hanover.

Victoria cringed as she pushed open the gate, but no dead children showed up to attack her. She jogged as fast as she could over the broken, uneven asphalt, out of Haunted Alley, around the ruins of Dark Mansion, and up a narrow paved path between Dark Mansion and the Martian Arcade. Hanover’s car must have barely fit through.

“Stop!” Victoria shouted, her heart racing as she ran to the open gate in the pitchfork fence. “You have to stop!”

She was too late—Hanover had thrown the dynamite. She watched the tiny glowing fuse tumble through the air as the stick of dynamite spun toward the devil’s face, eight stories above.

The stick didn’t even make it halfway up before it stopped, then began falling downward again. It banged into the outer wall of Inferno Mountain and clattered its way down through the concrete boulders, right back toward the spot where Hanover stood.

“Oh, shit!” Hanover yelled, ducking behind his car.

The dynamite exploded near the base of the mountain. Its boom was deafening, like a shotgun blast. Smoke plumed out in every direction, followed by a wave of shattered concrete chips that flew out from the mountain.

Victoria dropped and covered her head before the concrete splinters rained down on her. They bit into her arms, scalp, and back, and she winced in pain.

Chunks of concrete struck Hanover’s car, denting his hood, cracking up his windshield, and smashing one headlight.

“Goddamn it!” Hanover stood up among the billowing dust and walked to the front of his car. He picked up the broken neck of his whiskey bottle, which he’d left on the hood, and tossed it away. “God damn it, my Scotch!”

Then he reached into the crate for another stick of dynamite.

“Wait!” Victoria shouted.

He finally seemed to notice she was there.

“Did you see that?” He gave her a drunken grin as tried to line up the cigar in one hand and the dynamite in the other. The dynamite stick looked old and corroded, with strange little lumps all over the outside. “I just gotta hold it longer after I light it...let the fuse burn just a teensy-eensy little bit longer...”

“Don’t!” She grabbed his wrist to keep the cigar away from the fuse. “My friend’s inside the mountain. You could hurt him.”

“Shouldn’t be anybody in there,” Hanover grumbled. “Park’s closed.”